Tommy Siegel | Bluesky
Transcript
Single panel comic
Illustration of a highway with 3 billboards for fast food chains. A bridge is visible in the background, as are power lines running along side of the service road.
Each billboard has a chain logo, with secondary text below.
Wendy’s
- Your fifth favorite burger is now an app
McDonald’s
- Will you give us your data for food?
Burger King
- Guess what: No app? No food
I doubt the person who drew this comic has had the misfortune of trying to order food in China. It’s basically a literal form of what the comic is poking fun of, and it’s ubiquitous.
In China, you can go up to the counter, but you cannot place an order. Sometimes, you cannot even read a physical menu. Not even so much as a menu on the screen. You have to scan the QR code using the Panopticon app (also known as WeChat) and then get bombarded with advertisements. Like us and get a free drink! Click here for a random coupon! Join our WeChat group! No, no, no, no. Then click through their garbage UI to find the one thing you actually want. Make sure you don’t accidentally replace your order with one of their “recommendations” that pop up! Then, try to check out. Do you want to join our WeChat group for exclusive deals? Do you want to create an account? Dismiss, dismiss, dismiss.
Click here to pay. Only WeChat Pay is accepted. No cash, you backwards peon. Enter your mobile number here. Required to order. Ha ha, nice try, 123456789 is not your mobile number. No worries, we got it from WeChat. You’ll get 3 order confirmation texts and 2 advertisements a week for the next six months.
Mfw the “communist” country that can do no wrong according to the tankie instances out-enshittifies the home country of enshittification and capitalism in general 🤦🏻😄
Meanwhile, the best baseball player in the world is Japanese, the number one ranked player in the NBA is Serbian, and they’ve even been overtaken as the most obese people by the citizenship-deprived residents of American Samoa!
If not for Handegg and money hoarding, the US would hardly be #1 at ANYTHING anymore!
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
Now download our app.
If not for Handegg and money hoarding, the US would hardly be #1 at ANYTHING anymore!
The US has ended like 40 wars this year alone!
The US has ended just the Iran war 40 times already, without even counting the others.
Hey now, we’re still the #1 lapdog of the petrochemical industry!
I saw a post about this last night. Really scary stuff.
jesus fucking christ.
Removed by mod
I’ve seen this in Abu Dhabi. A bit creepy but it came with inbuilt convenience like letting your party members each pay for their items or splitting into X portions (you can pay for n*X portions if you want). Sure it’s handy but just give me a paper menu for fucks sake, let me ask the staff for a recommendation
It’s not getting out of control at all. Just stop eating at these places.
I had no idea they even had apps, because I don’t eat at these places.
They used to have good deals. I was able to order meals with deals and points to get a combo for a dollar. You used to be able to customize better too. I was able to put fresh diced jalapenos on my beef n cheddar.
Now the customization options are worse and the deals are worse. I hardly go anymore. Just not worth it. I can get a better deal at the sit down restaurants.
That’s classic enshitefication. First it is good to hook you, then it gets slightly worse but you still use it out of habit, then it gets terrible and there is no other option.
Agreed. Supposedly all the best deals are on the apps, and the food is reasonably priced like it used to be if you play your cards right. However, to use those apps, you’re agreeing to binding arbitration in perpetuity should they fucking kill or maim you with their shitty food. That’s not a tradeoff I’m willing to make. I’m also not fond of ever giving anyone my data unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I just don’t go to these places unless I’m desperate and it’s the only thing open.
Stop buying fast food. The companies are scum, its terrible for you and you will save a lot of money.
That Burger king one is legit by me. They cut their staff so much they have 2 people cooking and one kiosk you can self order at that’s broken half the time. Half the time you to to the drive through and they have a sign that says “app orders only.” It’s insane.
First time I saw a restaurant with an app only menu (that obviously required your phone number too) I just froze in confusion, looked at the staff like they were stupid (they looked me the same) and left. It was in Tallinn, Estonia. Later when I checked the rewievs of the place, those implied that it was more of a money laundering place than an actual restaurant, but I won’t go further into that. Suspicious anyways. Found great food in the next door restaurant, they had a normal menu as did most other restaurants except some take-away pizzerias.
This is not generally common here in the US, but Indian restaurants now tend to have no menu, just a QR code that you scan and then you order from their website (no apps so far, or at least they’re not mandatory yet). I was a mobile app programmer until about five years ago and I had to ask these guys how to scan a QR code.
Interesting. I wonder what they do when someone has no phone or internet access tho? I have worked in many restaurants and saying no to money is usually not the way to go.
Okay, dumbass gen-X-er here. Why in the name of Zeus’ butthole is there an app for any of these places? Let alone a compulsory one?
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Brand recognition. Makes you more likely to patronize said brand if you are seeing their logo on your phone multiple times a day … Likely hundreds. especially for iPhone where it’s on the home screen
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Data collection and tracking . lots of these fuckers run in the background, calling home to report back what apps you have, your location, phone number etc. They’re using this info to market to you more efficiently and to sell to others for profit. My wife had a shit ton these and her battery was dying faster than usual. Got rid of the bastards and battery life improved.
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Advertising. Direct. To you. If they have a deal or feel like you haven’t opened the app enough, they send you notification spam. It’s a corporations wet dream. Immediate visual direct to consumer advertising and they paid nothing to achieve it. You just simply gave your permission for them to do so
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If you’re ordering via app, this opens up the possibility of giving others different prices depending on if they think you’ll bite or accept it. This is much easier to do on an app or mobile site… But impossible if you order in person
Good news for me! it’s precisely for these reasons (and there are more) that I won’t ever get their apps, and that also means I’ll avoid eating at these trashfood places
I’d like to take the moment to thank these corporations 👍✊
But I hate all those things 🙎🏻
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There are many fast food chains that effectively require the app
McDonald’s and Subway are examples. You’ll be paying quite a bit more without the app exclusive deals
There are also many chains that don’t require an app for the best deals. Burger Kind and Culvers being examples
I wish this comic had a bit of nuance, because Burger King shouldn’t be getting lumped in because they’re better than most others
But the deal are so shit in recent years I just don’t even go there anymore
I didn’t mind the app, but even then they still didn’t stop make them shittier over the years with them being less reliable and losing features I just uninstalled them.
That Burger king one is legit by me. They cut their staff so much they have 2 people cooking and one kiosk you can self order at that’s broken half the time. Half the time you to to the drive through and they have a sign that says “app orders only.” It’s insane.
screw em all. they just want all your personal info to sell for increased profits
For a while, you could get fries or a McChicken for free or nearly do with the app. Like 5 years ago.
If you’re getting a deal, it’s fine? People pay iPhone prices for Google Pixel phones and don’t care that Google makes like $1700 a year off their data, and they defend this.
If you’re not getting a deal, don’t use the app. If you used it before but you don’t use it now, that data isn’t still helping them. It’s stale. Like a lot of their food. And that Pixel phone.
Tbh, Google Pixels have an unlocked bootloader, which is pretty rare nowadays, and nothing stops you from installing an OS without Google services. And I highly doubt they are able to extract any meaningful data when you are using such OS, even if there are hardware backdoors installed. It’s just extremely hard to do complicated* stuff, including data collection, while not being detected, and with just access to low level hardware; network packet analysis would give away any such attempts immediately. (*as in ‘more complicated than a few hundred assembly instructions’)
Modem firmware is a bit more than a few hundred assembly instructions. It’s mostly owned by Qualcomm, implementing trade secret designs made up by the boards of all sorts of corporations. Yes, even on the Samsung SoC design ordered by Google. That’s the price of phone calls.
Yeah, the mysterious Intel ME probably does similar things, but nonetheless these subsystems don’t have capabilities nearly as huge as the main OS, so they can’t store a lot of data, or do a lot of computation, or do stealth networking - (rant warning) such as embedding data in packets, that would require stealing the cryptographic keys from the main RAM, or even from other physical modules, basically so much convolution, that would be defeated by a simple update to the networking stack with changed offsets etc., I mean you would have to do crazy things to embed a universal rootkit you can never update yet is never detected doing shady stuff. This sounds more in the area of CIA capabilities, not really hardware manufacturers, but I really doubt they would risk revealing something so serious just to collect some meaningless data. TL;DR CIA backdoor probably exists, data collection backdoors are not feasible.
Intel ME can, in fact, inject packets, for it’s intended purpose of managing laptops at enterprise level. Don’t know how exactly but it was said it’s running minix, so I guess there are drivers hardcoded for some adapters. IIRC (source: truss me bro) it could use Wi-Fi in raw mode without the OS, associate by itself and stuff.
But uh, yeah, about the modem: it’s less that there’s some evil backdoor with global conspiracy but more that the cell towers can determine precise location at no cost (stored for a while which cops can look at) and that there’s radio fingerprinting and stuff, with a whole entire load of nothing you can do about it because of how little we know. Pretty harmless when radio is off. Not really phoning anyone with your phone anymore but yeah.
Yeah, that is inevitable, that’s indeed the price you pay for using public infrastructure. It is going to get a lot worse, Flock cameras being just the heralds of things to come. But this cannot be effectively fought at the personal level, this is just a matter of who has the political power. I am much more interested in what we, as individuals can do that the government can do nothing about. Basically we have kinda trustworthy public encryption algorithms, so preventing side channel attacks and trying to make hardware verifiably safe is IMO the principal battle to fight right now.
The problem with a third party ROM without Google Services is that a lot of these apps simply won’t work without Google Services present. You might as well be using a flip phone as far as this stuff is concerned.
I am using a phone without Google Services with no issues regarding YouTube, banking apps, etc. How?microG, an open source implementation of Google Services, and it works pretty damn well. Because it’s open source, I know that Google cannot steal any data I am not knowingly giving them :)
Yeah, they definetely kept the best deals for people that used the app as incentive to use the app. Now that focus has kind of shifted and the deals have been cut back to a minimum and its the same ones every time. The free fry is still cool and sadly the only way to get a 20 piece nugget for $5 bucks. Its nuts, but they want $5 for a 10 piece now which is nuts. If you cant get a deal dont go, but sometimes you can get everything for a decent price still and thats when I will sometimes go.
There’s a major fast food place near my office that is 100% app-ordering only. They have locker lined up like PO boxes on the outer wall where you pick up your order, and you can’t talk to anybody. They call it a “Digital Kitchen”.
You’re allowed to tell us the name of the fast food chain
Not in this case. I’m already uncomfortably close to doxxing myself with my comment history, and that last detail would probably absolutely nail who I am.
Ah OK, that’s fair
No, because doxxing.
If I can do it from a website I wouldn’t have a problem with it. It’s the install/app permissions that would make me skip over ever going there
Get ready for burger+ subscription.
I haven’t been out to eat since the pandemic. And, the more I read about how much it’s changed for the worse, including how ridiculously expensive it’s become, I don’t think I’ll ever eat out again.
Whoa nellie.
I mean, I guess it depends on your area and such, but there still great places to eat out if the situation allows for it. Of course groceries are cheaper, but some places are still affordable.
I wouldn’t touch any of the comic’s chains though. I think I went to a McDonald’s once since the pandemic, for a quick breakfast while on the road, and it was indeed disproportionately expensive. But (as an example) taco Tuesday at Rosa’s Cafe is still reasonably priced here.
Run everything in a sandbox ftw. Nothing touches the host ever. No apps talk to one another and you have total control of data going in and out of each sandbox.
Or just eat real food.
I was more so going at this from a general point of view as it’s not just fast food apps with that behavior. In the age of data mining it’s safe to assume the vast majority of apps/services are doing this…
So I am an app fan. If there’s an app available, I will use it. However, I do have to say the fast food industry is one of the few industries that I had used the apps for and then stopped.
Mostly because you can take any fast food restaurant out there and it will likely fall into at least one of these categories.
- app barely functions
- food gets prepared when you arrive anyway
- deals on the app are either non-existent or not worth it
- improper worker training leads to order mistakes or deals not applied
You would think that the number one reason for not using the app in today’s world would be the absurd pricing for the food or the fact that there is non-existent deals. But honestly, the second bullet point is the one that I have the biggest issue with.
Like seriously, what is the point in ordering ahead using a mobile app if you arrive at the establishment and you have to wait 20-30 minutes in the drive-through line anyway? You go by the drive-through window anyway to get your order. You might as well just place the order at the drive-up window, be able to vocalize exactly what you want in the order without the restrictions that the app forces you on it, and if they’re out of something or one of their machines are broken so they can’t do a part of the water, they can inform you of that before you give them your money.
McDonald’s is notorious for that. I used to give them a pass because you weren’t charged until you arrived there anyway, so it made sense that they didn’t prep ahead. But about four years ago now, I believe, they updated the app to charge you when you place the order, and then proceed to still not start your order until you go up to the drive-through window and give them your order code.
most things that are apps do not need to be apps. they need to be bookmarks
Agreed, most could easily be done by just exposing the login to the web browser, and then allowing an order to be placed from there.
Honestly I think if Google ever actually cracked down on their app sandbox (they would never but imagine), and implemented something like Xposed did back in the day where everything is isolated and can not access anything without explicit permission with the ability to also give fake information if configured to, I think we would definitely see a heavy push into just having it run via a web browser, instead of everything their own 300-500mb app
Whenever I order stuff at McDonald’s, it’s been over a femtosecond since my last visit, so the app has logged itself out. So I always need to sit down and re-login. With mandatory 2 factor authentication. No TOTP, of course, it sends the code to email.
Welcome to McDonald’s. Papers please.
Can’t you order from the in store screens or with a worker behind the counter? I haven’t been to McDonalds in a few months though.
I don’t use the app myself but I believe it’s the only way to get discounts / deals these days.
I know an even cheaper method.
Ah, the old drive-through interception – a classic!
![but seriously this fast food situation is getting out of control [Tommy Siegel]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/333c7b0d-a459-48ce-baf4-108ba3f5aa2d.png){kind=link}